rspec Versus Shoulda Versus Fitnesse and test parameters

I bought the beta to help decide on which testing tools to adopt for a project. I was glad to see you covered most of tools I was considering. I did not see Fitnesse covered (even though you quoted Uncle Bob ;-) ). I was also disappointed to see the rspec chapter missing as I’m changing my testing tools to use Cucumber or Fitnesse.

Also, If I move into cucumber space. I am still at a quandary on whether to move from shoulda to rspec….if I move into the cucumber space.

Also interesting is pickle..http://asciicasts.com/episodes/186-pickle-with-cucumber. This allows the tester to use parameters to do post lookups. For example: create a new order = order id 87769 then go back and verify 87769 exists. This is a scenario that we would need alot in our environment. It is actually one of the reasons we are looking at Fitnesse over Cucumber as it has seems to have better support for test output parameters later on in the test.

Well, Fitness is pretty much out of scope of the book, it’s not a Rails tool, and as far as I can tell doesn’t have much footprint in the Rails community. It’s a cool thing though, and if you like it, go for it.

I’m not sure what you mean exactly by testing output parameters, but if I understand you correctly, I think you can manage this in Cucumber by setting instance variables, which persist across step definitions over the life of a feature. Let me know if I’m not quite getting what you are asking.

As far as Shoulda vs. RSpec, if you already have a body of Shoulda tests on a project, then it’s probably not worth the time it would take to convert. I normally advise teams to choose based on which syntax feels more natural, as you can manage all your testing needs nicely with either tool.